Advanced Crop

I recently had the opportunity to try out "Advanced Crop," a plug-in for iMovie that provides one of the most important functions in movie editing: the ability to crop a clip to an arbitrary shape, or punch an arbitrarily shaped "hole" into your clip. Here are some of the key features of this plug-in:

- Blending with cropped parts (100 levels)
- Setting lower and upper blend limits
- Inverting selection (for "holes")
- Mixing a background picture into cropped parts
- Cropping any shape from your clip
- Cropping your clip to any shape
- Highlighting parts of your clip (using blend-back)
- Darkening parts of your clip (using blend-back)
- Making space for letters, chroma-keying areas
- Inserting logos into cropped areas

It's worth noting that there is a free, much simpler version of this plug-in available as well. However, there are some limitations to keep in mind:

- Because of a limitation in iMovie, you cannot alter the actual size of the clip. Anything you crop off will be set to a user-selectable background color or picture.
- In demo mode, the plug-in watermarks the clip with a "please register" message. However, it functions identically to the registered version.

Overall, I found "Advanced Crop" to be a useful and versatile tool for anyone who works with iMovie. It's easy to use and offers a wide range of options for cropping and editing your clips. However, be aware of the limitations I mentioned before making your purchase. To use this plug-in, you'll need Mac OS X 10.1 or later and iMovie 3.